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Asked by everybodychungs9000 to Caspar on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: Your Research.
Question: When babies make sounds are they trying to communicate with us or is it just jibberish? Is it like thier own language?
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Caspar Addyman answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Learning to speak is one of the hardest skills that babies have to master so a lot of their babbling is actually them practicing how to get the sounds of their language right. Speaking requires you to very carefully coordinate muscles in your lungs, your throat and larynx, and your mouth and lips. It’s even more complicated than walking and you can see how long it takes.
So a lot of the early noises that babies make are just noises. But there is also a lot of time when they are trying to say things but they can’t quite manage it.
Comments
tanz commented on :
In the womb, it is said a baby can hear its’ Mothers’ voice? So, later on could they repeat these noises – or would they forget them and just repeat what they hear?
Caspar commented on :
In the womb the baby can hear a muffled version of their mothers voice and quite a few other sounds from outside. Studies have shown that new born babies can recognise their own mother’s voice and even their own language! When given a choice they prefer listening to a recording of their mother than another woman. And they also prefer listening to a stranger speaking their mother’s language than a stranger speaking a foreign language. This experiment was run in Holland, Russia and Japan and each nationality of baby prefered it’s own language!
Caspar commented on :
This video tells you a lot about all the work that babies have to do to learn to speak..
A man called Deb Roy filmed the whole of the inside of his house for the first 3 years of his son’s life and uses the video to track her development. Here’s a video talk he gives about it. It’s amazing and well worth watchin . it is about 20 minutes long but it’s not hard to follow,
http://on.ted.com/90mA
http://on.ted.com/90mA